Afrikaans

Afrikaans, one of the eleven official languages of South Africa. Until 1996, when the South African constitution introduced provisions to raise nine indigenous languages to official status, Afrikaans had been one of only two official languages in South Africa. Afrikaans, or Cape Dutch, is a West Germanic language principally derived from the South Holland dialect of mid-17th-century Dutch settlers in South Africa. Although it is very similar to Standard Dutch, it is a separate language with a distinct sound system. It gained loanwords from English, French, and German (through settlers) and from African languages and underwent grammatical simplification (for example, verb tense endings were dropped). Phonetic changes also occurred: sch- became sk- (Dutch schoen; Afrik. skoen, “shoes”), final t was lost after some consonants, and so forth. Until the mid-19th century Afrikaans was a spoken language only; Standard Dutch was used for writing. A movement then arose to make Afrikaans a literary language. It was gradually used in newspapers, schools, and churches, and in 1925 it officially replaced Standard Dutch. Afrikaans literature has evolved during the 20th century, and in 1933 the first complete translation of the Bible into Afrikaans was published.